MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG.

Victory Girl Toni Williams deploys the double negative positively.  "It Is NOT Patriotic To Root Against Anti-American Olympians."  Olympians, like any other citizens, have the right to hold opinions, and provocative reporters of a certain stripe like to deploy athletes as endorsers of political positions, and sometimes they sound off in colorful ways.  Predictably, in the Age of Trump, there will be Trump-critical sports reporters looking for like-minded athletes to sound off, and, predictably, the culture warriors will sound off about the athletes sounding off.

Better, she urges, to consider the source and bestow obscurity on the athlete.

Whine. It’s so hard. Whine more. Spoiled athletes. Angry because someone didn’t give them enough love. Or, enough ice time.

I am an old-fashioned girl. Even when I think my country and its leaders are wrong, I still love it. Every year I buy the White House Historical Society ornaments, even when I intensely dislike the President, like Biden and Obama. I still root for my country to win when I don’t like or despise athletes. I don’t cheer on the creeptacular athletes, just my country.

Don’t drag your country when you are outside of its borders AND find someone from your country you can cheer for. We have soldiers competing in the Olympics. Cheer for them. Don’t cheer for pay-for-play Eileen Gu either.

Yes, it's a strange sort of socialism that pays one Stanford student more to ski than all the tea farmers in Guangxi earn.  But then I remember Lieutenant Vladislav Tretyak of the Red Army hockey club.  But the ones who express their opinions on national affairs, which are as valid as Toni Williams's, or mine, or, dear reader, yours, but different: let them earn obscurity by their politics.

Don’t root against Olympic athletes from the USA, just ignore them. It is not patriotic to root against them. That diminishes you. Don’t do that. Don’t root for them and, for pity sakes, don’t buy any products they endorse. Go USA!

Indeed, particularly with the Border Battle coming up Thursday.  Canada will play Team USA, meaning divided squads from the University of Wisconsin and Ohio State will seek Olympic Gold in women's hockey.